By Evans Ufeli Esq
The presentation of the 2026 budget for Ukwuani Local Government Area, by the Chairman, Barr. Chiamaka Solomon Possible Ajede staged amid the pall of a pending legal contestation, was nothing less than a theatrical contrivance; an exercise in form that sought to substitute for substance, a perfunctory pantomime masquerading as deliberative governance. Where the law interposes its quiet injunction and the halls of justice bear the weight of litigation, civic processes acquire a solemnity and a pause; yet, on the 29th day of January 2026, that solemnity was transmuted into a hurried pageant, and the very instruments of public trust were made to dance to the tune of expedience.
The episode was strikingly marked by language that betrayed its own infirmity. In his closing remark, the Majority Leader declared, with a flourish of assertion, that the budget “is as good as passed.” Those words, uttered in the echoing chamber of the legislative arm, were not merely rhetorical bravado; they were an attempt to breathe immediate life into a procedure that the courts, by reason and conquest of jurisdiction, had rendered dormant. To proclaim passage where judicial restraint has taken root is to ignore the separation of powers that is the bulwark of orderly governance. It is to treat the rule of law as an optional ornament rather than the keel that keeps the ship of state from foundering.
Procedurally speaking, the presence of pending proceedings in the Delta State High Court rendered any immediate legislative action suspect and, in the eyes of equity and jurisprudence, vitiated. The doctrine of sub judice is not a mere technicality; it is the manifestation of a constitutional discipline that prevents executive or legislative impatience from frustrating adjudicative processes. When a dispute is before the court, prudence and fidelity to the public interest demand that administrative and legislative arms refrain from acts that may prejudice the subject matter of litigation. To do otherwise is to court confusion and to invite judicial correction.
Beyond technicalities, there is the matter of intent and good faith. Public acts carried out in bad faith are not cloaked by the garb of legality; they remain tainted and subject to annulment. The hurried convocation of an “emergency” sitting, the belated circulation of purported notices, and the imprecise chronology of events all combine into a narrative that suggests opportunism rather than deliberation. The presentation of the budget under such circumstances smacks of a calculated attempt to pre-empt judicial scrutiny and to secure, by force of ceremony, what the courts might yet declare invalid. Where governance becomes gambit and procedure becomes ploy, the courts are bound to interpose.
It is therefore neither fanciful nor hyperbolic to foresee that the budget presentation of 29th January 2026 will not withstand judicial inspection. Courts, meticulous in their guardianship of process, will look beyond appearances to the realities that produced them. They will examine whether the convening of the sitting respected statutory notice requirements, whether the actors were acting within the bounds of their authority while the matter was sub judice, and whether the proceedings were conducted with the candor and documentary transparency that public business demands. Where those elements are wanting, the judiciary will not hesitate to declare the proceedings null and void, for the law cannot countenance fruits that spring from a poisoned root.
Moreover, the public interest cries out for such correction. Budgets are not mere ledgers; they are the moral contract between the governed and those entrusted with public stewardship. To pretend that a budget has been validly adopted, when in truth the process that yielded it was rigged or rushed, is to betray that contract. Citizens deserve clarity and legitimacy in the processes that determine how resources are allocated and how priorities are set. Any attempt to cloak impropriety in the color of procedure does a disservice to the community and undermines confidence in public institutions.
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In the end, the law is less an instrument of retribution than a means of restoration. The setting aside of the 29 January sitting, should the court so decree, will not be an act of punishment but of rectification; a reassertion that public acts must be performed in the light of the law, not in its shadow. It will be a reaffirmation that governance must bend its will to legal constraint and that no assemblee, however animated, may lawfully claim permanence for acts taken in defiance of judicial process.
Let those who steward the affairs of Ukwuani remember that legitimacy is earned by adherence to rule and respect for procedure. The sunlit promise of representative government is impoverished whenever expediency supplants deliberation. If the events of 29 January are examined with the clarity that patience and jurisprudence afford, the inevitable conclusion will be that what was presented as a budget was a simulacrum; a hollow rite that, in due course, will be set aside so that genuine, lawful, and transparent process may take its rightful place.
